Bad Hair Day (18 page)

“That’s not how it went at all,” he said, but he couldn’t meet my eyes.

“Yeah?” I snorted. “Then why are you shaving off all the hair?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The hair, you idiot. The nanos cause extreme hypertrichosis.”

I grabbed his arm and yanked it toward me. Unfortunately, said arm was holding up the towel, which slithered to the floor too quickly for him to grab. I had proof. I wasn’t letting it go, even if it was wearing uncomfortably tight underwear.

“See, you’re shaving it off.…”

But then I stopped. His arm had a smattering of fine blond hairs on it. No stubble. Nothing like the furry stuff I’d pulled out of Bryan or the samples I’d taken from the scene of the attack. Not at all.

Was I actually wrong about something science-related? The
thought made me all shaky and breathless, like the girl in a vampire romance. I sank down to a squat and tried not to flip out, because then I would have to stage an intervention on myself.

I’d thought I was over all those worries about my potential hackness once I’d defeated the zombies, but they all came flooding back. Because really, what did I know? I’d cured Grable’s disease, true, but that didn’t exactly make me the high school equivalent of Alexander Fleming. I was back to hackdom again; you’d think I would have been used to it by now.

The bath mat I crouched on was an ugly tan color, at odds with the rampant lacy crapness infesting the rest of the house. The bathroom itself burgeoned with pink lace: the curtains on the window, the rose-printed soap holder, even the frill-covered tissue box. It was an anomaly, this bath mat, but I couldn’t get my hacky brain to make sense of it.

“Kate?” Sebastian folded his arms and looked at me with a stern expression. “Are you on drugs?”

I looked up at him, and that simple head motion threw my crouch entirely off balance. I put one hand down to steady myself. The bath mat felt coarse underneath my fingers, and I jerked instinctively away from its yucky crunchiness. Something stuck to my fingers, and I whipped them around wildly trying to get it off, like maybe it was infective or something. Tufts of tan fluff scattered across the floor; I could see a pile of it under the vanity.

That bath mat was covered entirely with hair. And I’d just touched it.

I leapt off the mat, shoved an increasingly bewildered Sebastian
out of the way, and washed my hands. Twice. In scalding water. Not that I thought the hair was going to do anything to me, but I didn’t exactly know what part of Sebastian’s body this hair came from.

“What the heck is wrong with you?” he asked, picking the towel up and wrapping it around himself again. I noticed bits of hair stuck to the towel, but I didn’t mention them because he might drop it again, and my overstressed psyche couldn’t take much more of that.

“Sebastian?” I tried to sound all logical and not entirely grossed out. “If you don’t know what I’m talking about, why do you have a bath mat covered in human hair?”

S
ebastian and I stood in his bathroom. Actually, that’s not quite descriptive enough. We glared at each other over a hairy bath mat, and he was wearing only a pair of undies and a towel. It wasn’t exactly the kind of situation I expected to find myself in when I’d gotten out of bed that morning.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, but we both knew he was lying.

“This!” I waved my hand, which despite the vigorous washing still had little strands of hair stuck to it. “The hair. On your bath mat. The nanos stimulate hair growth, don’t they? One of my friends turned into a werewolf and threw me into a wall yesterday. Rocky is missing. So I do not have any patience left. You better start talking right now, damn it, or I’m calling the cops.”

His shoulders slumped at the mere mention of the police.
The towel slumped too, but I kept my eyes glued firmly to his face.

“All right,” he said. “All
right
. But it’s not what you think.”

“Of course it isn’t. You injected yourself with untested nanomachines by accident. Whoops.”

I was awfully proud at the amount of sarcasm I managed to pack into those few words, but he didn’t even seem to notice. Unappreciated again.

“I didn’t use the nanobots on myself. I was going to, but my girlfriend talked some sense into me first.” He met my eyes for the first time since I’d burst into his bathroom. “You’ve got to believe me. I’ll admit that I took them from Nanotech; I thought maybe it would change things. Look at me. I’m twenty-two and I still live with my parents. My only social interaction is on
Roargan Kross
. I’m tired of being a nerd. You know what I mean.”

I resented the implication that I was somewhere in his league. “Actually, Sebastian, I have no freaking clue.” I scowled, but I didn’t yell because I remembered all too well what a wuss he was. He’d devolve into a quivering blob of primordial jelly, which would be cool to experiment on but not so helpful when it came to extracting information on the nanobot front. “But go on. I assume Holly was your girlfriend?”

He nodded, and his face started to scrunch up in what I’d begun to recognize as his pre-breakdown expression. I quickly changed the subject. “Okay. So you stole the nanobots from work. And then what happened?”

“My brother took them. I was in here with the syringe, trying
to get up the courage to use them on myself, but Holly talked me out of it. I decided to return them to work so no one would ever know they were gone in the first place. But my brother overheard us. His bedroom’s right next to mine. He took the bots from me by force and used them on himself.”

“He sounds like a great guy,” I said.

“I didn’t know what to do. But nothing happened right away, and I started hoping they hadn’t worked. We’d never used them on humans, you know. But the next morning, he came in and threw me into the wall.” He paused, rubbing his head.

“I feel your pain. Trust me.”

“He came home from school early, ranting about throwing encyclopedias. I would have thought he was hallucinating except that he’d miraculously grown fur; it was still growing so fast that I literally watched it get longer. He wanted to know about the bots, kept rambling about how great he felt and how strong he was. And he kept talking about recruiting, like he was some kind of supervillain or something. He held me up by the throat, and I couldn’t breathe. So I told him everything.”

“What do you mean, everything?”

“I’ll give you the documentation so you can read for yourself. The nanobots enhance muscular response, making people faster and stronger. He was particularly interested to know that they’re bloodborne.”

I snorted. “Of course. He wants to start his own pack. I take it he’s a Twi-hard?”

“A what?”

“Never mind. Go on.”

“Then Holly’s brother Herbie came into town to visit, and we were hanging out at the coffee shop one night while Holly was working. My brother showed up and started pushing me around, and Herbie threatened to call the cops. My brother just snapped, and he tore Herbie apart with his bare hands. I saw it; I was right there, and I guess I dropped Dr. Burr’s ID when I ran. He’s always leaving it places, and I’d found it on the floor on my way out of work and meant to give it back to him.

“Anyway. You have no idea how scared I was. I came back here and locked myself in my room. Holly didn’t know anything, but my brother was convinced that she was going to turn him in. He was in here ranting and raving about it. I think the bots are making him paranoid. And then he killed her too. I know he did.”

He broke off, his lower lip quivering. Part of me felt bad for him, but mostly I wanted to spin him around and check for a spine. There had to be one in there somewhere.

“So why not go to the police?” I asked.

He gave me a don’t-be-an-idiot look, which under the circumstances was the most insulting thing he could have possibly done.
I
wasn’t the one who stole potentially dangerous nanomaterials. And then there was the part where he was voluntarily standing on a bath mat covered in his brother’s hair. That went beyond stupidity and into psychosis territory.

“Isn’t that obvious?” he asked. “I don’t want to die too.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s say that I believe you. What do you plan to do about it?”

“Do?” His eyes widened. “I’ll tell you what I’m doing: I’m installing three dead bolts on my bedroom door, and I’ve got food supplies stashed under my bed. I’m locking myself in until he burns out. It’s got to happen sometime; his body’s on metabolic overload. The bots are hypersensitive to adrenaline; we found out in the animal testing. The more he produces, the quicker he’ll burn out. So all I’ve got to do is wait.”

“And then what? He dies?”

Sebastian shrugged uncomfortably. “Anything’s possible.”

I stood there for a minute, thinking hard. Or trying to, anyway. The bare-chestedness was really distracting. “Do us both a favor and put on some clothes, will you?”

He looked down, like somehow he’d forgotten the fact that he was standing there in his undies. I didn’t know how; I certainly hadn’t been able to forget it. He wiped the dried blood off his face and put on some pants. A shirt would have been nice, but I wasn’t about to ask for miracles.

After he got dressed, he turned to me for further instructions. I was ready.

“First, I need that documentation you mentioned before.”

He handed over a heavy notebook bound with a pink plastic spiral. “If somebody catches you with this, I’m going to be in big trouble. That’s proprietary information, you know.”

I glared at him. “If someone catches me, this binder will be the least of your troubles. You understand?”

“Yes.” He hung his head.

“All right. Do you have any idea where I can find your brother?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”

“Well, you’re no help,” I said. “I’m going now. If you see your brother, call me.”

I rummaged through the junk on his desk without bothering to ask first, because he didn’t have the spine to say no to anything as far as I could tell. Finally, I found a pen. I scribbled my number on the back of an envelope and tacked it to his wall, where he couldn’t lose it without really making an effort.

Something was bothering me. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I had the feeling that I was missing something important, like a mental itch I couldn’t quite reach. It wasn’t like I didn’t have a lot on my mind. Rocky was still missing, and Bryan was a werewolf, and Jonah probably had a concussion, and my relationship with Aaron was possibly over, and I had to figure out how to deactivate the nanobots without killing anybody, especially myself. And if that wasn’t enough, I was officially late for Rockathon setup. Kiki was probably going to throttle me if someone else didn’t get there first.

Wait a minute. Rockathon. The chairs. I got out the sheet of paper Kiki had given me.

“Sebastian, what’s your address?”

“Seventeen Meadowbrook Lane.”

I thought I might throw up. The paper in my hand said:

“Your brother is Trey Black?”

“Yeah.” He took one look at my stricken expression and stepped away like I might hit him. “What? Do you know Trey?”

“I know him.” I had the intense urge to put my head in my hands and stay there for about a hundred years. But someone would eventually find me in Sebastian’s bedroom, which would give a whole new definition to the word
humiliating
.

“Yeah, you would. You go to Bayview, right? Are you friends or something?”

“Hardly.” I took the binder and forced my feet to move toward the door. “He keeps trying to put the moves on me despite the fact that he’s friends with my boyfriend. I honestly don’t get it.”

“That sounds like my brother. When we lived in Honolulu, he stole my prom date. After we got to prom.”

“Wow. And I thought I had it bad.”

He nodded mournfully. “They took off in the limo together. I saved up for months to rent that limo. But that’s just how he rolls. He honestly couldn’t give a crap what anybody else thinks. When he sees something he wants, he hunts it down and kills it.”

“Excuse me. He seems to want
me
right now.”

I glared at him so hard he actually whimpered. It didn’t make me feel better. Nothing would make me feel better now that I knew the king werewolf was my boyfriend’s new best friend.

Of course, Aaron probably wasn’t my boyfriend anymore. Somehow, that failed to make me feel better too.

*

A few minutes later, I let myself out the front door, cradling the binder like it contained the Ten freaking Commandments. The trophy wife stood in the driveway next to my car with a camera in one hand and a flyswatter in the other.

“Um,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“I think there’s a Yeti in our yard.” She sounded half terrified, half thrilled. Under the seven pounds of makeup, her eyes were wide. “I’m going to make millions off the video.”

A Yeti? I scanned the bushes for werewolves. No luck. So I tiptoed to the stone lions and checked behind them.

“They’re not real,” whispered the trophy wife.